The Copper Peacock Read online

  Peter phoned the morning before he was due to leave New York. They talked about the weather, the heavy snowstorms which had been sweeping the east coast of America. Then Peter said, ‘That was terrible about Judy.’

  A strong word to use but Peter was inclined to be intense.

  ‘How did you know?’ Bernard said.

  ‘I saw it in the paper, of course. I do make a point of seeing English newspapers while I’m here.’

  They were at cross-purposes. ‘What did you see in the paper?’

  Peter sounded astonished. ‘That he killed her, of course. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I used to tell her he’d do it one day. I told her to leave him but she wouldn’t. She must have talked to you about him surely? I can’t believe she came in all that time without a mark on her from what he was doing to her. They’ve charged him with murdering her. Don’t you read your newspaper?’

  He hadn’t known her name, he said, he hadn’t known where she lived or anything about her.

  ‘What did you talk about? Didn’t you ask?’

  Bernard said goodbye and slowly let the receiver slide into its rest. What had they talked about, he and Judy? His work, English literature, books, his past career. He had talked and she had listened. Raptly, he thought now, her battered face lifted, her damaged eyes watching him. Why hadn’t she said what happened to her at home? Why, instead of giving him that ridiculous tasteless thing, hadn’t she thrown herself on his mercy, confided in him, offered herself to him?

  He didn’t say a word about it to Ann. ‘What happened to the peacock bookmark?’

  ‘The children were playing with it and Jeremy kept putting it in his mouth, so I threw it out.’

  He wanted to hit her, he wanted to strike her in the face, and he clasped his hands together to keep himself from that.

  Weeds

  ‘I am not at all sure’, said Jeremy Flintwine, ‘that I would know a weed from whatever the opposite of a weed is.’

  The girl looked at him warily. ‘A plant.’

  ‘But surely weeds are plants.’

  Emily Hithe was not prepared to enter into an argument. ‘Let me try and explain the game to you again,’ she said. ‘You have to see if you can find a weed. In the herbaceous borders, in the rosebeds, anywhere. If you find one all you have to do is show it to my father and he will give you a pound for it. Do you understand now?’

  ‘I thought this was in aid of cancer research. There’s not much money to be made that way.’

  She smiled rather unpleasantly. ‘You won’t find any weeds.’

  It cost two pounds each to visit the garden. Jeremy, a publisher who lived in Islington, had been brought by the Wragleys with whom he was staying. They had walked here from their house in the village, a very long walk for a Sunday afternoon in summer after a heavy lunch. Nothing had been said about fund-raising or playing games. Jeremy was already wondering how he was going to get back. He very much hoped to catch the twelve minutes past seven train from Diss to London.

  The Wragleys and their daughter Penelope, aged eight, had disappeared down one of the paths that led through a shrubbery. People stood about on the lawn drinking tea and eating digestive biscuits which they had had to pay for. Jeremy always found country life amazing. The way everyone knew everyone else, for instance. The extreme eccentricity of almost everybody, so that you suspected people, wrongly, of putting it on. The clothes. Garments he had supposed obsolete, cotton frocks and sports jackets, were everywhere in evidence. He had thought himself suitably dressed but now he wondered. Jeans were not apparently correct wear except on the under-twelves and he was wearing jeans, an old, very clean, pair, selected after long deliberation, with an open-necked shirt and an elegantly shabby Italian silk cardigan. He was also wearing, in the top buttonhole of the cardigan, a scarlet poppy tugged up by its roots from the grass verge by Penelope Wragley.

  The gift of this flower had been occasioned by one of George Wragley’s literacy anecdotes. George, who wrote biographies of poets, was not one of Jeremy’s authors but his wife Louise, who produced best-sellers for children and adored her husband, was. Therefore Jeremy found it expedient to listen more or less politely to George going on and on about Francis Thompson and the Meynells. It was during the two-mile-long trudge to the Hithes’ garden that George related how one of the Meynell children, with appropriate symbolism, had presented the opium-addicted Thompson with a poppy in a Suffolk field, bidding him, ‘Keep this for ever!’ Penelope had promptly given Jeremy his buttonhole, which her parents thought a very sweet gesture, though he was neither a poet nor an opium addict.

  They had arrived at the gates and paid their entry fee. A lot of people were on the terrace and the lawns. The neatness of the gardens was almost oppressive, some of the flowers looking as if they had been washed and ironed and others as if made of wax. The grass was the green of a billiard table and nearly as smooth. Jeremy asked an elderly woman, one of the tea drinkers, if Rodney Hithe did it all himself.

  ‘He has a man, of course,’ she said.

  The coolness of her tone was not encouraging but Jeremy tried. ‘It must be a lot of work.’

  ‘Oh, old Rod’s got that under control,’ said the girl with her, a granddaughter perhaps. ‘He knows how to crack the whip.’

  This Jeremy found easy to believe. Rodney Hithe was a loud man. His voice was loud and he wore a jacket of loud blue and red checked tweed. Though seeming affable enough, calling the women ‘darling’ and the men ‘old boy’, Jeremy suspected he was the kind of person it would be troublesome to get on the wrong side of. His raucous voice could be heard from end to end of the garden, and his braying unamused laugh.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to find a weed,’ said the granddaughter, voicing Jeremy’s own feelings. ‘Not for a pound. Not at the risk of confronting Rod with it.’

  Following the path the Wragleys had taken earlier, Jeremy saw people on their hands and knees, here lifting a blossoming frond, there an umbelliferous stalk, in the forlorn hope of finding treasure underneath. The Wragleys were nowhere to be seen. In a far corner of the garden, where geometric rosebeds were bounded on two sides by flint walls, stood a stone seat. Jeremy thought he would sit down on this seat and have a cigarette. Surely no one could object to his smoking in this remote and secluded spot. There was in any case no one to see him.

  He was taking his lighter from his jeans pocket when he heard a sound from the other side of the wall. He listened. It came again, an indrawing of breath and a heavy sigh. Jeremy wondered afterwards why he had not immediately understood what kind of activity would prompt the utterance of these sighs and half-sobs, why he had at first supposed it was pain and not pleasure that gave rise to them. In any case, he was rather an inquisitive man. Not hesitating for long, he hoisted himself up so that he could look over the wall. His experience of the countryside had not prepared him for this. Behind the wall was a smallish enclosed area or farmyard, bounded by buildings of the sty and byre type. Within an aperture in one of these buildings, on a heap of hay, a naked girl could be seen lying in the arms of a man who was not himself naked but dressed in a shirt and a pair of trousers.

  ‘Lying in the arms of’ did not accurately express what the girl was doing but it was a euphemism Jeremy much preferred to ‘sleeping with’ or anything franker. He dropped down off the wall but not before he had noticed that the man was very deeply tanned and had a black beard and that the girl’s resemblance to Emily Hithe made it likely this was her sister.

  This was no place for a quiet smoke. He walked back through the shrubbery, lighting a cigarette as he went. Weed-hunting was still in progress under the bushes and among the alpines in the rock garden, this latter necessarily being carried out with extreme care, using the fingertips to avoid bruising a petal. He noticed none of the women wore high heels. Rodney Hithe was telling a woman who had brought a Pekinese that the dog must be carried. The Wragleys were on the lawn with a middle-aged couple who both wore straw hats and George Wragley was tell
ing them an anecdote about an old lady who had sat next to P.G. Wodehouse at a dinner party and enthused about his work throughout the meal under the impression he was Edgar Wallace. There was some polite laughter. Jeremy asked Louise what time she thought of leaving.

  ‘Don’t you worry, we shan’t be late. We’ll get you to the station all right. There’s always the last train, you know, the eight forty-four.’ She went on confidingly, ‘I wouldn’t want to upset poor old Rod by leaving the minute we arrive. Just between you and me, his marriage hasn’t been all it should be of late and I’d hate to add to his troubles.’

  This sample of Louise’s arrogance rather took Jeremy’s breath away. No doubt the woman meant that the presence of anyone as famous as herself in his garden conferred an honour on Rodney Hithe which was ample compensation for his disintegrating home life. He was reflecting on vanity and authors and self-delusion when the subject of Louise’s remark came up to them and told Jeremy to put his cigarette out. He spoke in the tone of a prison officer addressing a habitual offender in the area of violent crime. Jeremy, who was not without spirit, decided not to let Hithe cow him.

  ‘It’s harmless enough out here surely.’

  ‘I’d rather you smoked your filthy fags in my wife’s drawing-room than in my garden.’

  Grinding it into the lawn would be an obvious solecism. ‘Here,’ Jeremy said, ‘you can put it out yourself,’ and he did his best to meet Hithe’s eyes with an equally steady stare. Louise gave a nervous giggle. Holding the cigarette end at arm’s length, Hithe went off to find some more suitable extinguishing ground, disappeared in the direction of the house and came back with a gun.

  Jeremy was terribly shocked. He was horrified. He retreated a step or two. Although he quickly understood that Hithe had not returned to wreak vengeance but only to show off his new twelve-bore to the man in the straw hat, he still felt shaken. The ceremony of breaking the gun he thought it was called was gone through. The straw-hatted man squinted clown the barrel. Jeremy tried to remember if he had ever actually seen a real gun before. This was an aspect of country life he found he disliked rather more than all the other things.

  Tea was still being served from a trestle table outside the french windows. He bought himself a cup of tea and several of the more nourishing biscuits. It seemed unlikely that any train passing through north Suffolk on Sunday evening would have a restaurant or even a buffet car. The time was coming up to six. It was at this point that he noticed the girl he had last seen lying in the arms of the bearded man. She was no longer naked but wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. In spite of these clothes, or perhaps because of them, she looked rather older than when he had previously seen her. Jeremy heard her say to the woman holding the dog, ‘He ought to be called a Beijingese, you know,’ and give a peal of laughter.

  He asked the dog’s owner, a woman with a practical air, how far it was to Diss.

  ‘Not far,’ she said. ‘Two or three miles. Would you say two miles, Deborah, or nearer three?’

  Deborah Hithe’s opinion on this distance Jeremy was never to learn, for as she opened her mouth to speak, a bellow from Rodney silenced all conversation.

  ‘You didn’t find that in this garden!’

  He stood in the middle of the lawn, the gun no longer in his hands but passed on for the scrutiny of a girl in riding breeches. Facing him was the young man with the tan and the beard, whom Jeremy knew beyond a doubt to be Deborah’s lover. He held up, in teasing fashion for the provocation of Hithe, a small plant with a red flower. For a moment the only sound was Louise’s giggle, a noise that prior to this weekend he would never have suspected her of so frequently making. A crowd had assembled quite suddenly, surely the whole population of the village, it seemed to Jeremy, which Louise had told him was something over three hundred.

  The man with the beard said, ‘Certainly I did. You want me to show you where?’

  ‘He should never have pulled it out, of course,’ Emily whispered. ‘I’m afraid we forgot to put that in the rules, that you’re not supposed to pull them out.’

  ‘He’s your sister’s boy friend, isn’t he?’ Jeremy hazarded.

  The look he received was one of indignant rage. ‘My sister? I haven’t got a sister.’

  Deborah was watching the pair on the lawn. He saw a single tremor shake her. The man who had found the weed made a beckoning gesture to Hithe to follow him along the shrubbery path. George Wragley lifted his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug and began telling the girl in riding breeches a long pointless story about Virginia Woolf. Suddenly Jeremy noticed it had got much colder. It had been a cool, pale grey, still day, a usual English summer clay, and now it was growing chilly. He did not know what made him remember the gun, notice its absence.

  Penelope Wragley, having ingratiated herself with the woman dispensing tea, was eating up the last of the biscuits. She seemed the best person to ask who Deborah was, the least likely to take immediate inexplicable offence, though he had noticed her looking at him and particularly at his cardigan in a very affronted way. He decided to risk it.

  Still staring, she said as if he ought to know, ‘Deborah is Mrs Hithe, of course.’

  The implications of this would have been enough to occupy Jeremy’s thoughts for the duration of his stay in the garden and beyond, if there had not come at this moment a loud report. It was, in his ears, a shattering explosion and it came from the far side of the shrubbery. People began running in the direction of the noise before its reverberations had died away. The lawn emptied. Jeremy was aware that he had begun to shake. He said to the child, who took no notice, ‘Don’t go!’ and then set off himself in pursuit of her.

  The man with the beard lay on his back in the rose garden and there was blood on the grass. Deborah knelt beside him, making a loud keening wailing noise, and Hithe stood between two of the geometric rosebeds, holding the gun in his hands. The gun was not exactly smoking but there was a strong smell of gunpowder. A tremendous hubbub arose from the party of weed-hunters, the whole scene observed with a kind of gloating horrified fascination by Penelope Wragley, who had reverted to infantilism and watched with her thumb in her mouth. The weed was nowhere to be seen.

  Someone said superfluously, or perhaps not superfluously, ‘Of course it was a particularly tragic kind of accident.’

  ‘In the circumstances.’

  The whisper might have come from Louise. Jeremy decided not to stay to confirm this. There was nothing he could do. All he wanted was to get out of this dreadful place as quickly as possible and make his way to Diss and catch a train, any train, possibly the last train. The Wragleys could send his things on.

  He retreated the way he had come, surprised to find himself tiptoeing which was surely unnecessary. Emily went past him, running towards the house and the phone. The Pekinese or Beijingese dog had set up a wild yapping. Jeremy walked quietly around the house, past the drawing-room windows, through the open gates and into the lane.

  The sound of that shot still rang horribly in his ears, the sight of red blood on the grass was still before his eyes. The unaccustomed walk might be therapeutic. It was a comfort, since a thin rain had begun to fall, to come upon a signpost which told him he was going in the right direction for Diss and it was only a mile and a half away. There was no doubt the country seemed to show people as well as nature in the raw. What a nightmare that whole afternoon had been, culminating in outrageous violence! How horrible, after all, the Wragleys and Penelope were and in a way he had never before suspected! Why were one’s authors so awful? Why did they have such appalling spouses and ill-behaved children? Penelope had stared at him when he asked her about Deborah Hiithe as disgustedly as if, like that poor man, he had been covered in blood.

  And then Jeremy put his hand to his cardigan and felt the front of it, patted it with both hands like a man feeling for his wallet, looked down, saw that the scarlet poppy she had given him was gone. Her indignation was explained. The poppy must have fallen out when he hoisted himse
lf up and looked over the wall.

  It was a moment or two before he understood the cause of his sudden fearful dismay.

  The Fish-Sitter

  Next door to the Empress Court Disco Roller Rink in Seoul Road, Southend, was the South-east Essex branch of Daleth Foods and next to that the Aquarium. It was a parade of interesting and even exotic emporia as are often found in the hinterland of seaside resorts. Goods were sold, services offered and entertainment provided.

  For instance, in a flatlet above Magda’s Sports Equipment Ruta Yglesias the clairvoyante told fortunes, next door was a beauty clinic entirely devoted to eyes, the painting of their lids and lashes and the enhancement of their sparkle, and at the photographer’s, last in the parade, little girls might dress up in tutus with ribbon laces cross-gartered to their knees, and dream as they posed that they were Veronica Spencer dancing Giselle.

  The Aquarium’s real name was Malvina’s Marine Museum, a grand title for what was quite a modest affair. On a sunny afternoon, when the beaches and the shops were crowded, the amusement arcades busy and the streets empty, Mrs Trevor was showing her fish-sitter round the tank room. It was lit, even on a day like this, for each tank had its own strip light as well as its own aeration pump. These were necessarily at floor level, set to illuminate the green ever-moving, ever-bubbling water below, and sending up into the tank room a glaucous, rather misty, glow. In the room below, visitors to the aquarium could be seen only occasionally and then dimly through glass and water as they moved, mostly in silence, between the Sarcopterygii, the Selachii and the Decapoda. Some paused to read the printed and illustrated labels attached to the wall by each tank. Others pressed their faces against the cool glass and the marine creatures swam close to inspect them.